I love the Mezze style of meal where you can try a little of what you fancy instead of wishing you had ordered your friend’s meal. I like the congeniality of sharing food, passing it around, letting the conversation flow, taking your time over the meal. There’s the smooth hummus paste of chickpeas, garlic and tahini, the Moutabal creamy aubergine puree, the tabbouleh salad of bulgar wheat, speckled green with parsley and fragrant with lemon. Then the little hot sausages of spicy minced meat, or the miniature flaky pastry fingers enclosing salty cheese, or the Labbneh yoghurt dip with lemon and mint. All these I enjoyed during my travels in Lebanon.

But after a while, the mezze started to get a little repetitive. Let me explain. If you eat in a Lebanese home, you’ll get a totally different eating experience with a wide range of dishes and flavours. But in a typical local reaturant in Lebanon, the main foods on offer are a range of Mezze followed by different types of grilled meats, fresh fish cooked simply over the grill and fruit to follow. Grills can be nice and the fish was delicious but usually quite pricey, so for a light lunch we inevitably ended up with Mezze. Every day. I realised that it didn’t actually matter whether you payed top prices for your Mezze in a city restaurant or went cheap and cheerful in a backstreet cafe. The Mezze is almost always good and fresh because it’s such a staple.

Also by this author

This is a story about a fast food meal, with no golden arches in sight at the Cervejaria Trinidade in Lisbon. We were taking a last Sunday morning wander around the streets of Lisbon, climbing the hill up to the Chiado district where we had spent the even

When on holiday I spend idle hours window shopping which I could never afford at home. I admire the handicrafts in shops designed to tempt the relaxed holiday-maker into parting with their money. Here on the coast of Sardinia there are many jewellery shop

Depending on your point of view you may find the Peruvian delicacy of roast guinea pig as a horrid way of treating our squeaking furry friends or just another local speciality to try. My friend Joanne decided to keep an open mind and give it a try on her

We’d just climbed up through the narrow cobbled streets of Rovinj, to the cathedral square with a great view of the sea at the top of the hill. As we rested on the wall among the other tourists, the silhouette man appeared from no-where. With his sharp li